How much did ‘Yong Jin-hyung, who was born at third base, contribute to winning the championship?
“Some people are born on third base. And he lives his whole life thinking he hit a triple.”
Barry Switzer (86), former coach of the National Football League (NFL) Dallas, said: If you are a reader of ‘Baseball Bikini’, you will easily guess what that means without explaining it. If you translate ‘born on the third base’ into a more general expression, you could say ‘I was born with a golden spoon in my mouth’. So, that word is an expression of criticism for those who are only born with a ‘golden spoon’ and think they are proud of themselves.
“You will not be able to come down yourself. It is not a position that I climbed on my own.”
In the JTBC drama ‘The Youngest Son of a Conglomerate Family,’ which ended on Christmas last year, Jin Do-joon (Song Joong-ki) slams the Sunyang Department Store’s representative nameplate on the desk while saying this to his aunt Jin-hwa-yeong (Kim Shin-rok). Jin Do-joon is the youngest son of Jin Yoon-gi (Kim Young-jae), the out-of-wedlock of Chairman Jin.
“Ayu~ I don’t have an aunt, so I guess she doesn’t know.”
There is one luck that Jin Hwa-young did not enjoy. She has no children by Evolutionary Spirit. And I guess Jinhwa-young also sees this as a weakness. Otherwise, there is no way Jin Hwa-young, who emphasized to her father that she is “not a daughter, but a main dish,” would have finished with a furious expression even after hearing her personal aggression remarks to her sister-in-law Son Jung-rae (Kim Jeong-nan).
In the real world, even the grandson of a conglomerate family has a different ‘class’. Jeong Yong-jin, owner of professional baseball SSG Landers (vice chairman of Shinsegae Group), is the grandson of Samsung Group founder Lee Byeong-cheol (1910-1987), Hoam. Shinsegae is also a ‘conglomerate group (conglomerate) with restrictions on cross-shareholding’, ranking 11th in terms of total assets. If you are the eldest son of a family like this, there is no problem at least sitting in the position of the owner of a professional baseball team.
What is the suspicion of the secret power?
Vice Chairman Chung hit a ‘triple’ by making SSG the Korean Series champion two years after acquiring SK Wyverns. While the name of the baseball team representing Incheon was changed from Wyverns to Landers, it was Vice Chairman Chung himself who emerged as the top star in the team. Vice-Chairman Jung, who was envious of baseball fans calling NC Dinos owner Kim Taek-jin (56) “Taek-jin hyung,” became a definite “Yong-jin hyung” by winning the Korean Series.
So it’s no wonder that after the Korean Series awards ceremony, Vice Chairman Chung was the first member of the team to grab the microphone. Vice-Chairman Jeong, who took the microphone while fans chanted his name, said, “We don’t have a single one of the 14 individual categories, but we have the first place in the home crowd mobilization record.” Following the Wire-to-Wire championship, which holds first place from start to finish), he also won the Korean Series.”
‘Yong Jin-hyung’ also acted as a ‘poster boy’ in the ‘winning advertisement’ published by SSG in each newspaper. SSG produced a photo of Vice President Jeong waving the team flag in front of the team as an advertisement. After the Korean series ended, Vice Chairman Chung’s will of course must have worked in the ‘Sseuk Sale’ held by the parent company E-Mart and Shinsegae Department Store. Prior to the discount event, Vice Chairman Jeong also disclosed the sale schedule in advance, saying, “Please refer to it for work,” on his social network service (SNS). Baseball fans also admired Vice Chairman Chung, saying, “There is no other owner like this.”
However, the atmosphere changed when there were suspicions that a ‘secret power’ was involved in the process of resigning former general manager Ryu Seon-gyu (53). When baseball fans demanded clarification through Instagram, Vice Chairman Chung said, “This is a personal space. I hope you don’t mistake it for communication.” In the end, SSG denied the allegation of the secret powerhouse by announcing a position statement saying, “As a corporation and due to the nature of the baseball team where hierarchy and autonomy coexist, it would not have been possible to operate as well as good results with abnormal management.”
The professional baseball team is also basically a corporation in the form of a ‘stock company’. Shinsegae Baseball Team owns 100% of the shares issued by the controlling company, Emart Co., Ltd. And Vice Chairman Chung is the largest shareholder with 18.6% of E-Mart Co., Ltd.’s shares. However, most of the members of the current SSG club are ‘from SK’, who have not been appointed by Vice Chairman Chung. If you turn this upside down, it also means that the members of the club do not know the parent group as well as the owner. It would be understandable if change was needed to close this gap, and if you decided that after winning the Korean Series was the right time to make that change. But… .
business of baseball“Baseball is too sporty to be a business, too businesslike to be a sport.”
Philip K Wrigley (1894-1977), former Major League Baseball (MLB) owner of the Chicago Cubs, said: It is also the sentence I quoted when I evaluated former general manager Ryu as a ‘romantic’ in ‘Baseball Bikini’ just a year ago. It is probably because he understood this physiology well that former general manager Ryu left the team with only the words, “I fulfilled my duty with the combined championship.” Conversely, it can be said that it is because of the characteristics of this business that it is difficult for fans to easily break up with general manager Ryu Jeon, who has been with him since his SK days.
Ted Turner (85), former vice chairman of Time Warner, also had to taste frustration due to these characteristics of the baseball business. Thanks to his father who was in the advertising business, ‘born on third base’, he became the owner of the MLB team Atlanta Braves in 1976 at the age of 37. For reference, at the time, Atlanta was home to Jerry Royster (71), who would later become the manager of the Korean professional baseball Lotte Giants.
The problem was that Atlanta fell into a 16-game losing streak at the beginning of the season the following year (1977). Owner Turner, who served as general manager, gave manager Dave Bristol (90) a 10-day vacation. And during this time, he decided to coach himself and appeared in the dugout of the Pittsburgh Three Rivers Stadium, where Atlanta was ahead of their visiting game, wearing uniform number 27. The Pittsburgh club welcomed (?) him as the owner, president, general manager, and manager through the electronic display board. And Atlanta repaid Pittsburgh’s hospitality with a 1-2 defeat on the day as well.
Owner Turner could not hold the team’s baton for the last time on this day. This is because the MLB Secretariat put the brakes on the basis of the rule that ‘coaching staff cannot own shares in the club’. Owner Turner said, “I must have made this rule suddenly yesterday,” but withdrew, saying, “I have no intention of filing a lawsuit with the secretariat, so I will give up the position of director.” As for why he took on the role, owner Turner said, “If you’re smart enough to raise $11 million to buy a baseball team, you can also manage that team.”
He said he won thanks to the fans…
On the other hand, there are also people who took advantage of this physiology. Mark Cuban (65), famous for his outspoken character representing the NBA, was the owner of the Dallas Mavericks. It wasn’t until the 2010-2011 season, 11 years after acquiring Dallas, that Cuban experienced his first win. ESPN, which was in charge of broadcasting the championship match, first asked the owner of Cuban to comment on his victory after the award ceremony was over. In response, the owner of Cuban said, “Coach Nick Carlisle is over there. Ask Nick,” he said, passing the microphone. 토토사이트
Unlike Vice Chairman Chung and owner Turner, the owner of Cuban was a person who was ‘not born at third base’. The father of Cuban’s owner was an auto mechanic. The owner of Cuban is a self-made man who founded Micro Solutions, a computer software seller, and Audionet, a college basketball Internet broadcasting company, and succeeded. He bought an NBA team with the money he earned from his business. It is unclear whether the money that Vice Chairman Chung or the owner of Turner bought the club was really ‘his own money’. Of course, those who were born on third base would think that they made money on their own.
Those born on third base are often (unsurprisingly) friendly. If the world is kind to you, there is no reason to be unkind. And on those rare occasions when the world is unkind, there are plenty of people who want to make it clear what it means to be born on third base. It’s hard to say that it’s necessarily wrong. You don’t have to respond to unreasonable demands just because you were born on third base.
However, one thing is for sure: if he shouted, “I will take up the baseball fans’ time,” I had to make the fans sincerely believe that I won the championship because of the fans. But it probably won’t be easy. It would have been because it wasn’t just the feeling he said with his own thoughts.
※We asked an official who has now left Shinsegae Group about the suspicion of SSG Landers secret power. The official, whose hometown is Busan, avoided answering, saying, “It is not the right thing to talk about my previous job.” At the same time, he added, “Even if there are 100 secret powers, it’s good, so I really want to see Lotte win.”